In which prattling Polonius and assorted conspiracy theories feature ...

With the Daily Telegraph having its terrible Tim Flannery moment yesterday, the pond rushed off looking for reassurance.

Not a word from Tim Bleagh or Akker Dakker, but the Bolter was reassuring at the way the disgraceful alarmism was continuing:

How dare the Daily Terror peddle this monstrous scare

Do you really think this warming pause is temporary, alarmist fear mongering Daily Terror?

If coral reefs can survive an atomic bomb, Daily Terror, why not an invisible, harmless gas?

More pathetic Daily Terror intellectual pollution on carbon dioxide

Oh okay, the pond changed those headlines just a little.

Those stories are actually the Bolter, in a fine endlessly continuing fury, flailing away at the usual suspects - Fairfax, warmists, and so on and so forth - without seeming to realise that the enemy is within.

For a brief, giddy moment, the Terror went Tim Flannery. Please, keep it to yourself Daily Terror, the warmists are listening ...

Meanwhile, here's a reliable disappointment.

Stephen Conroy on the first tentative steps of the Labor party towards democratising its structures and listening to its membership:

Navel gazing.

Conroy seemed to think this sort of navel gazing would only lead to disdain in the electorate, seemingly not able to comprehend that its the ongoing presence of Conroy as a numbers man that might produce an even more sizeable amount of disdain ...

What else? Well martinet Judith Sloan was in very best form for the reptiles at the lizard oz this day:

Indeed. The pond immediately dusted off the good old Malaysian-sourced rattan cane ... there's nothing like a decent flogging to bring students to their senses, and given half a chance, the pond would do the same for the reptiles at the Oz ...

But enough of this frippery. The subject today is a decent Catholic education and as anyone who experienced it knows, the cane, the leather strap, the slap, the humiliating dunce cap, and dozens of other delights and tortures were an essential part of the process.

Happily, as everyone in the know knows, today is prattling Polonius day, and Gerard Henderson just loves to scribble about Catholics and the good old days.

As an aside, the pond was astonished to see the man who apparently dislikes the ABC to his visceral core turn up on the ABC, but there you go, there he was on Sunday, as cool and as insouciant as your average garden cucumber:

Oh dear, it was a reminder of just how dull Polonius could be as a televisual feast - disapproving of Eric Abetz being given the endearing nickname "Erica" - when really he's at his garrulous comedic best, in print, and especially in the opening for Bill Shorten win puts paid to emerging conspiracy theory:

Thank God Bill Shorten was elected Labor leader on Sunday. At the very least, it will diminish an emerging conspiracy which depicts Australia as being run by the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. Prime Minister Tony Abbott (born 1957) was educated at St Ignatius College in the Sydney suburb of Riverview. Coalition cabinet ministers Joe Hockey, Barnaby Joyce and Christopher Pyne were also educated at Jesuit secondary colleges. So was Shorten (born 1967), who attended Xavier College in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. 
The Prime Minister is a constitutional monarchist who is critical of the abuse of power by trade union officials and opposes same-sex marriage. The Opposition Leader is a republican who is an advocate of trade union privilege and supports same-sex marriage. Which indicates graduates of Jesuit schools reflect political diversity.

What a profoundly silly man.

He's just proved the conspiracy theory that Australia is being run by the Society of Jesus graduates, it's just that some of them have different ideas about how to go about it - see Joe Hockey versus agrarian socialist Barnaby Joyce.

The Jesuits have now collared both the Libs and the Labs and rule the roost!

When you're presented with this kind of logical howler, it can only get better as you read on.

How long, the experienced reader wonders, will it be before Polonius gets on to what bedevils the world, a lack of even-handedness, vile biased Fairfaxians and the dreadful inner-city left intelligentsia?

Okay, let's deal with the unbalanced Fairfaxians:

Sometimes Abbott's background is used against him. Windsor wrote that what the Jesuits want to know of Abbott ''is whether his policies make for a more humane, just and sustainable world''. Fair question. Provided the same query is made of Shorten, which it wasn't. During the election campaign, The Age's political editor Michael Gordon quoted a Riverview student critical of Abbott's position on asylum seekers. The student said: ''We think it's important to remind Tony Abbott, as a very outspoken Catholic, that he should take Jesuit ideals into account in his decisions.'' 
No such specific reprimand was directed at Shorten, whose policies on asylum seekers are not dramatically different from those of Abbott.

Indeed. Just sooh unfair ...

Especially as there's now no dramatic difference, at least since Abbott mislaid the tow and buy back the boats strategies, and apologised to everyone in Asia for being a bully boy and a verbal thug, and everything is wreathed in Stalinist silence so no one knows what's happening ...

As for the crusties? Well they're Jesuits these days:

Today Eureka Street is very much a product of the inner-city left intelligentsia. As its contributing editor Ray Cassin acknowledged recently, Eureka Street's readership contains a huge proportion of Greens supporters and a very low proportion of Coalition voters. Cassin also said: ''Eureka Street readers tend to be well educated and comparatively affluent: anxieties about job security and mortgage might have less sway with them.'' More like the Green Left Weekly than the Catholic Weekly, it seems.


Or put it another way, people who tend to read prattling Polonius and follow Tony Abbott are dumb, badly educated, comparatively poor, anxious, insecure, likely to get the sack next week from their fast food joint, and probably renting because they can't afford a mortgage, and too thick to work out that voting for their capitalist overlords isn't likely to make things better ...

Oh okay, that's just stereotypical nonsense, but if Polonius can indulge in it every week, why can't the pond?

The ultimate point of course is to pretend that the Jesuits - perhaps even the Catholic mafia - have had no sway or influence on Australian politics in the past, or the present:

Like many individuals and institutions, the influence of the Society of Jesus has been overestimated by its supporters and opponents alike. Abbott and Shorten obtained good educations. But both have lived most of their lives away from the Jesuits' education ethos.

So much for that old Jesuit saw in its various forms:

 “Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.”  
"Give me the children until they are seven, and anyone may have them afterwards." “Show me the boy until he is 7 and I will show you the man". (more details here)

Whatever, Henderson's piece features the usual distortions for which he's known and loved far and wide.

He seizes, for example, on a piece by Gerard Windsor in the lizard Oz, without linking to it - Jesuit old boys now our leaders (behind the paywall) - while seriously misrepresenting its much more nuanced understanding of Jesuit culture and its influence. According to Henderson:

Writing in The Weekend Australian last month, Gerard Windsor (a Riverview old boy, who for a time was a Jesuit seminarian) made the point ''pupils pick up their politics much more from their home than from their school''. 

But this omits Windsor's wider point:

The undeniable fact seems to be that pupils pick up their politics much more from their home than from their school. Jesuit schools are cramped drastically by two factors, two of them by their GPS affiliations. 
It was Athelstone, a newish school without any such baggage, that had itself registered as an offsite campus for the Baxter detention centre by headmaster Greg O'Kelly. And in Perth in the late 70s, John XXIII College, briefly headed by a Jesuit, Daven Day, opened, against some strong parental opposition, to young East Timorese displaced by the Indonesian invasion. 
Second, Jesuit schools lie in heartlands of blue-ribbon conservatism. Of the 1200 day boys at Riverview, 25 per cent live in Lane Cove, in the same postcode. Another 20 per cent are from Mosman, Northbridge and Middle Cove, on Sydney's north shore. A tension between the demography and the school's ideals are obvious. (you can google the rest)


And Windsor notes a more general tendency towards conservatism in the old days:

It was not until the late 1960s that overt political activity came to one of them. From 1968 to 1973, during Abbott's years at Riverview, the rector there was Greg Jordan. A marital connection of Tom Hughes, who was an old boy and one-time Coalition attorney-general, Jordan aligned himself quite openly with the conservative parties and had a high public profile in fighting against Gough Whitlam's contemplated cuts to funding for independent schools. 
One other Jesuit from the school brandished his politics. His breezy Toryism, his flamboyantly affluent lifestyle, his shameless cultivation of the rich and powerful - "I rang Peter Abeles to commiserate with him on the behaviour of the pilots" - gave him entertainment value, but few boys took him seriously. He was known to warn boys tossing up career options that: "You wouldn't make enough money doing that." 

Windsor is amusing - and cruel - later in the piece when a young Abbott, writing about the Desert Fathers decides to toss it all in and return to the world, when a chum tells him about flying to London to seal a $1.5 billion dollar deal.

Ironically, a great Jesuit teacher in Abbott's time at Riverview, Charlie Fraser, used to love a sentence from Bruce Marshall's spoof novel, George Brown's Schooldays: "Oh that I had the wings of a dove, says the Psalmist, that I might fly away and be at rest. Not, so that I might bugger off to New York for a directors' meeting with J. Pierpont Morgan."

Perhaps that helps explain Abbott's attitude to entitlements and allowances. But back to Windsor:

The period was one of confusion. The Vatican Council had left the Jesuits unsure about their educational and religious missions, and many younger ones felt they shouldn't run schools at all.
Perhaps predictably, out of this environment came a procession of conservative politicians at state and federal level; from Riverview alone: Stephen Lusher, Nick Greiner, Chris Hartcher, Abbott and Gillespie. Since the 40s, with one celebrated exception, every old boy of the Jesuits who has gone into politics has done so on the conservative side: 12 from Riverview, at least four from Xavier, two from Athelstone and one from St Aloysius. It was seen as their natural habitat. Old boys presumed it would be the case. For years now, a group of Jesuit old boys, led by men in their 70s, has travelled to Canberra for the budget speech in reply and to meet their politician fellows. But only those on the conservative side.

Windsor is particularly informative about the tensions within the Jesuits and their attempts to modernise and develop alternative attitudes in their assorted flocks, and Shorten's somewhat aberrant place within it.

If you want to learn more about Shorten's place in the scheme of things, avoid Henderson's pigeon-holing and have a read of Andrew Rule's somewhat hagiographic Bill Shorten: the son also rises.

In fact that's the real point the pond draws from this exercise.

If you want information and insights about the Jesuits, you read Gerard Windsor, and if you want clarifications of anything else led by Henderson, you must google and find alternative views and understandings.

If you want predictable, narrow, strictly ideological and politically conservative interpretations, you stick to reading Gerard Henderson, ranting in his usual way about inner city elites from his inner city eerie, berating the intelligentsia to which he belongs, an act of self-flagellation which only a cilice-wearing Catholic could usually manage.

Fortunately, thanks to Hendo, the pond has now come away from this morning's reading deeply imbued with the notion that Australia is in the grip of a Jesuit conspiracy.

Oh sure, the political flock might be as confused and as changeable as the Jesuits themselves, but hey, whoever said Stalin and Trotsky were ideologically one.

It seems clear from both Hendo and Windsor that the spawn of Jesuits are in charge, and that Catholics - long under the thumb of the Masonic conspiracy - now rule the roost.

Remind us Mr. Windsor:

Australia has just four schools under the care of the Jesuits: St Ignatius, Riverview, and St Aloysius in Sydney; Xavier in Melbourne; and St Ignatius, Athelstone, in Adelaide. Yet in the present parliament, the prime minister-elect, Tony Abbott, and the leader-in-waiting of the Nationals and hence the deputy prime minister-in-waiting, Barnaby Joyce, are Riverview old boys. 
The next treasurer, Joe Hockey, is an old Aloysian, and the future leader of government business and education minister, Christopher Pyne, is an old boy of Athelstone. The new Nationals member for Lyne, David Gillespie, is also an old Riverview boy, a classmate of Abbott.

By golly, throw in Bill Shorten, and the fact that both Hendo and Windsor are also old boys and it's done and dusted ... and the Jesuits can tall as the down under version of Eton ...

Now how to wrap up? How about a cartoon at Eureka Street, here, courtesy that wretched mob of greenie inner city elitists: